Well, I have not had a lot of time to myself with work and other commitments, but darn it I needed some ME time. So I have started on the "Wacky Packages" style parody of the "Puffa Puffa Rice Cereal" box. Not too much at this point, just the basic sketching but so far I think its going to be a fun one to do. Instead of "Kellog's Puffa Puffa" I thought it would be funny to make it "Kapakahi Pumice Pumice"...I know, I know my sick humor is in evidence. You will note the lovely wahine is holding the mask from the back of the box as a shield.

Puffed Pumice? That'll get your teeth clean! Looks promising, hope they give you enough time off work to finish it _________________When you hurry through life, you just get to the end faster.
Pirate Ship Tree House

Yeah puffed pumice would be hard on the teeth, but hey you would not need to brush your teeth after eating.

Quite a bit of progress on this one over the weekend after I stole some time for myself. I am not going to get very painterly on this one as it is more of a graphic sort of design, but I do want to have the wahine have some shadow and tone to stand out. Not entirely pleased with the kerning on the lettering, but being hand painted I guess it's not too bad. I will be putting the other "pumice" word on there after I trace the first one so it looks identical. "Kapakahi" means more or less messed up...or a not right situation from what I can gather so I thought it appropriate, and has a close enough sound to "Kellogs".

Howdy Wendy, well I am gratified that you are watching my progress... but right now I am trying desperately to learn the ropes at my new job, most especially the software (Flexisign). My employer has been more than patient, but for some reason I can't seem to get a handle on some aspects of the job (especially all the math) so have been constantly worried about getting fired. There is one heck of a lot more to etching glass than meets the eye, it seems every aspect and step of the job is an art form unto itself. I have never been good at math so all this fractions into decimals/millimeters, X and Y axis coordinates etc is driving me quite insane and I have been having to do a lot of "catching up" homework at home.

Long story short: only one thing has been on my mind and taking up all my time...work.

However, I do need to take some time out for me before I truly go nutters so I will probably be working more on the painting this evening. God I could use a vacation in a tropical paradise right now so I guess painting one is the next best thing.

A bit of an update just for you Wendy and Dan. (and anyone else actually following along)

So I got some time to work a little more on the cereal box parody, it's getting close but not quite there yet. I am finding this one a little harder than I thought because I want to keep the stark graphic design sort of look to it that the original box has, so that means I can't get all "painterly" with all the shading details on a lot of it. The volcano on the original Puffa Puffa Rice box, is deceptively simple, but really quite detailed and ornate in its own way. Some parts of it such as the smoke and eruption have a painterly blending of colors, but most of the volcano itself is starkly elemental in shapes. I decided to go with something that is akin to an old animation cel: the shading is in single non-blended stages on most of it, except for little bits where it has a brushed or airbrushed feel like the smoke, which is exactly how you would do that for an animation cel. Originally I was going to make the pumice rocks coming out of the volcano black, but it didn't look right. After researching a bit I discovered that pumice stone can actually be a variety of colors including a yellowish wheat. I was also going to make the wahine more island authentic with a bit darker skin, but as I started on it I realized that she would have just blended into the volcano background. So I decided to keep her "peachy white", I guess she will be in good company with all the tiki bar matchbooks featuring white wahines I have seen over the years.

On another note: I was dumb and started painting on the flat panel without adding the sides since it is intended to be a deep "no frame" painting with the sides almost as big as the sides of a real cereal box. I found out putting on the sides AFTER is not a good idea. I hid nails OK, except when it is at a certain angle, but one corner part has a small splinter out of the wood (the right bottom corner of the volcano). It's really not very big, but if you look closely it is visible which kind of bothers me.

Here is the progress so far...

From the side showing the depth

Detail of the wahine

I want to paint the sides with all the nutrition information panels and all the authentic stuff from the real box, but am having a very hard time finding any clear pictures of the other parts of the box. All I can seem to find is the front and back. If anyone has some decent pictures of the box sides and box top/bottom I would be grateful if you could share them please.

Christmas went pretty well, we had a nice tree:

But I have been having a problem for several years off and on with a very bad ingrown toenail.I don't have any insurance and could not afford to see a podiatrist, so figured if it was gonna get done I would have to do it. Tonight I could not stand the pain of it any longer and performed some self surgery with an exacto knife and needle nose pliers. Below are my surgical tools, along with circled in red the main "root" I extracted from the toe (there was actually a lot more to the ingrown nail: it had three offshoots of sharp points about the thickness of a needle growing in three directions).

Here is the big bad toe, kinda inflamed. I had to use the exacto to actually "saw" away an entire edge of the toenail, then used needle nosed pliers to yank it out. I had to constantly keep it under running hot water to keep it soft enough to do all this. The pain was pretty intense, so after I was done I had to take some pain killers.

So, with one toe partly "de-clawed" this tiger is going to be hobbling around for a bit (again).

Thanks for the graphic do-it-yourself home surgery in a box tips Hope everything heals up well.

I'm no painter so I got lost in the technical mumbo-jumbo, but the progress is looking great. As far as nutritional information, that's a pretty recent development and probably wouldn't be found on a vintage cereal box.